Safety’s Bad Habits

In this episode, Mary Conquest speaks with Murray Ritchie, an experienced OHS practitioner, researcher, educator, and speaker who’s worked with various industries, governments, and NGOs.

He joins us to discuss the content of his new book: ‘Seven Bad Habits of Safety Management - Examining Systemic Failure’ (published September 2023).

Murray gives EHS professionals an honest, open and comprehensive appraisal of current approaches to Safety Management, covering education, regulations, Plan Do Check Act, the right to refuse, Heinrich, BBS, Zero Harm, Safety Culture, and so much more.

This insightful interview is packed with real-life examples from his 40-year career and extension academic research, highlighting where the industry is failing to improve.

Murray’s on a mission to propel Safety out of its ‘comfort zone’. This conversation helps HSE professionals focus on what’s important: finding facts and fixing them before somebody gets hurt.

- [Mary] Hi there. Welcome to "Safety Labs by Slice." Before we can improve anything, including safety management, it helps to understand what's not working now. Even more helpful is to understand how we got to where we are today because it gives us insight about mistakes to avoid and assumptions to question. Today's guest has done just that in his upcoming book, "Seven Bad Habits of Safety Management: Examining Systemic Failures."

I've had a sneak peek, and today we'll discuss some of the ideas you can expect to explore in the book. Murray Ritchie has over 40 years of field experience in occupational health and safety. He's a safety practitioner, researcher, educator, and sought-after keynote speaker working with various industries, governments, and NGOs. Murray obtained a master of science degree in occupational safety and health late in life, following a boots-on-the-ground career in the offshore oil and gas industry.

He's worked on five continents, consulting to a wide variety of industries, has served on program advisory boards for two colleges, and taught for the University of Alberta Faculty of Extension. This is his first book and we're happy to have him with us today. Murray joins us from Jalisco, Mexico.

Welcome.

- [Murray] Thank you, Mary. Nice to see you again.

- So, let's just start at the basics. What was your impetus to write the book?

- You know, I think the push was out of frustration. Having sat on two boards, two different colleges, and being a program advisory advisor, and having been a learning manager at one of those colleges, what I discovered was that we're still teaching outdated practices.

There is so much research going on, especially now, there's research all over the world happening, and yet we tend to still teach the same old, same old. You know, we teach things that are wrong. We teach things that we know are wrong. And when I tried to sort of dig into that and why that was, I think a good part of that has to do with the way we accredit safety profession.

We teach them to write the exams and the exams haven't changed much. So, that really was the push. It's like, okay, let's start calling this stuff out. Let's start really having a look at it. And as you know, from your other guests and a lot of the comments that you see on your podcast, there's quite a bit of debate around a lot of this stuff.

And I think part of the hesitation to change is because there's a lot of money tied up in this stuff. If I'm busy selling something that's outdated and I have a vast market, I'm not going to change it, you know, it'd be like changing the recipe of Coke. It's a disaster. So, yeah, that what...

- What do you mean? New Coke was great.

- New Coke, I don't drink Coke, I can't tell either way. But yeah, that's what really got me thinking, okay, somebody has to do something. The book itself isn't a how-to or what-to, I call it conversation starter.

- Right. So, plan-do-check-act, and folks, I'm probably going to call that PDCA throughout the rest of the interview just because it's quicker, it's at the heart of the book as the main reason that safety isn't moving forward. And you point out that PDCA was originally meant for quality control and it doesn't work for safety. So, that got me thinking, some guests I've had describe safety as an emergent property of quality.

In other words, if you have quality, safety will come naturally as part of that. And I'm gathering that you disagree, and so I'm wondering what's the relationship between the two.

- Well, I think there is a relationship between quality and safety certainly. I mean, you know, is it product quality, or is it safety quality? I mean, when we talk about safety management systems in the wild, when we look at safety management systems, who is checking the quality of those? Or when we look at tailgate meetings or field hazard assessment, there's no quality involved in that. That is checking boxes.

So, PDCA, there's a couple of reasons I think...I call it the activity trap. And it's not that it's wrong, it's not that it's wrong, it's how we implement it out of content. And it's mostly the way it's implemented. So, the first part, the problem I have with PDCA is people call it the Deming cycle or the Deming wheel. And Deming never said plan-do-check-act.

In fact, Deming was adamant that plan-do-study-act was very different than plan-do-check-act. The plan-do-check-act came from the Japanese that he was working with. They adopted his and Shewhart's teachings to plan-do-check-act. And since then they have changed. They have added to it, the Japanese have as a quality control product. Edwards Deming, he more than once has been quoted saying, that's not me.

Plan-do-check-act is not me. Plan-do-study-act is what I came up with after many years of changing it, you know, starting in the '30s. And when we apply it to safety, what we see...well, first off, we have to stop teaching kids that this is the Deming cycle.

Because, you know, God rest his soul, let's do him a favor and give him this due that he asked us to get his name off. But then aside from who we accredit it with, when we apply it to safety, the way it looks, I call it the activity trap because what happens is we plan for zero incident. We do safety, we do policies and procedures, then we check for compliance, and then we act by either rewarding compliance or reacting to lack of it.

And then we go back to the beginning and we start all over again, still planning for zero incidents. And we get into this circle of we're making plans without first checking the reality of the situation. It's really important that we...one of your guests, I believe I stole this from said, you know, before we can change the landscape, we have to understand, we have to see it.

And I can't remember who said that, but it's spot on. We can't be running around making plans if we don't know what we're planning for. And zero incidence is not the target, it's not a goal, it's not something we can plan for. So, we're missing so many pieces to that puzzle. And what it does is it gets everybody caught up in the do.

And as safety professionals, we love the do, we rush to the do. We feel like we have to do something because the reality of our profession is if we're doing a good job, nobody thinks we're worth anything because we're not doing anything. And that's what we want. We don't want to be doing stuff. The more stuff we do, the more problems we create. And throughout all the other bad habits, plan-do-check-act just keeps coming back and back and back because we implement it some very good ideas out there, starting with Heinrich had some very good ideas.

But when we implement them with PDCA, they get skewed and they get misused and implemented out of context.

- So, you had mentioned that there's a large body of research showing that PDCA doesn't work. And without asking real specifics, just an overview, what does the research say? Like, can you summarize what it's told us?

- Well, you know at the crux of it, like I said, is the activity trap. So, we plan to do safety, then we do policies and procedures, then we check compliance, then we act. And the way we act is by rewarding and reacting. And the way we do that is we go through our past, what's worked in the past? And the past is our comfort zone.

We pull from our comfort zone. So, what's worked in the past is we've offered bonuses for safety incentives. We've offered penalties for people that don't make quotas if we're doing behavioral observations. We do all kinds of things. So, what that does is it creates...later on in the book, I talk about the safety management cycle. So, what happens within the safety management cycle is we're so busy doing all this plan-do-check-act, we're so busy doing the do, we sort of lose sight of the plan.

And in all of that, there's always competing values. There's money, there's time, there's production, there's quality. All these things compete. As a result, all the incentives that we're using for the plan-do-check-act, let's say the plan is a policy statement. And so we say our policy statement, so the plan is going to be no job is so important that we can't stop and do it safely.

Well, that's generally a very hard value to demonstrate, especially when you have these competing values. So, what ends up happening is the workers themselves get caught up in this activity trap and they know what the issues are, but nobody's really asking them, nobody's really bringing them into the picture to help say, this is what the landscape looks like, where we are and our reality.

And as a result, there's a failure to respond. And that failure to respond when we continue going in this circle of plan-do-check-act and we keep doing it over and over and over again, that starts to erode the trust of the workers. And that erosion of trust creates a moral distress, which in turn leads to moral fatigue. And moral fatigue, if it's left unchecked will turn into ethical fading.

So, if we go back to the very basics of safety, the whole idea behind safety leadership, for example, is to create a want to effort on the part of the workforce. But ethical fading actually has the opposite effect. When we're busy telling workers what to do and how to do it and checking that they're doing it right and acting by rewarding or reacting, we're actually creating minimum effort.

And when we get that minimum effort, we go back to our comfort zone, which is plan-do-check-act, and then we start all over again. And this is what we call the safety management cycle. And if we do that enough times to a worker, we create moral disengagement to where, you know, I always say the only thing worse than having one of your best people quit and leave is having one of your best people stay.

And that's sort of what this circle of plan-do-check-act is that I think for the most part, we do it for ourselves. I think for the most part, we got stuck in this activity trap because we didn't have a lot of tools in the beginning. And we need to do something and we always feel the need to do something. And again, if we're not doing something, we feel like we're not doing enough when, in fact, in safety, doing nothing is what you want.

That should be your goal.

- Yeah, I think that's just cultural. If we don't look busy, then we're not being effective is sort of a fallacy that I think a lot of people believe. I'm curious about something, and this is a bit of a detail and it may be a newbie question, but it kind of caught my eye. When you're talking about workers, you were talking about the right to participate, the right to know, and the right to refuse.

And we've talked a lot, and I understand the right to refuse, but I've actually never heard in any of the conversations the other two, the right to participate and the right to know. Can you explain that a little bit for me? And apologies, listeners, if this is old hat to you, but...

- My understanding is that's pretty universal. But I know in Canada where you are, it's very much part of the labor laws, is that workers have the right to know, they have the right to participate, and they have the right to refuse. We tend to focus on the right to refuse. And I think we do that because it's a get out of jail free. It's like the internal responsibility system that says everybody's responsible for their safety.

And that's true to an extent. But if we continue to put people in hazardous situations, and then when things do go wrong, say, well, they had the right to refuse, we support their right to refuse. Now, imagine being that new worker who comes up and sees something that they think is, well, this is not right.

You know, I know even as a new worker, not even a young worker, when I'm into a new situation, it's extremely difficult to say, "Hang on, time out. I don't like this. I don't feel comfortable with this." I don't want to be that guy. Everybody else is doing it. So, the right to to participate is the biggest one, and that's where plan-do-check-act cause mishap again. Because very seldom, I don't think I've ever seen actually where any worker has been really embedded in the plan.

- Yeah, I was thinking the right to participate and to...

- The right to participate, the right to refuse, and the right to...oh, now I forget.

- Know, the right to know. So, it occurred to me that the right to refuse is there, but it's the most extreme. And really, if the right to participate and the right to know are properly implemented or properly respected, then maybe refusal, maybe it won't come to that.

- Yeah. And I actually don't like the word refusal anyway. I think, of course, we have the right to refuse. In the free world, everybody has the right to refuse most things. If the right to participate is done properly, you're right, then refusal is more...it's not a stop work authority, it's a realignment to work, let's reassess the work, and especially when we talk about cultures, different cultures.

There's so many cultures in our planet where young people feel it would be rude for them to refuse an elder, or somebody older than them, or a manager, or somebody of a higher class, or somebody of... So, I don't really like the word right to refuse, I like the right to participate should, you're right, eliminate that.

And you know, the right to participate is nothing new. I mean, William Heinrich in the '30s outlined the three principles to accident prevention. And one of them, the first one was to create an active interest in safety. That's the very first thing he says. And then, you know, if you do that and you allow the workers to be part of a solution, and I've heard this said many times on your show and on other podcasts that, you know, people so often think that workers are the problem, and they're not.

They're the solution. And if they have the right to participate, then we don't need to plan-do-check-act anymore. What we need to do is assess our current situation. We need to make a good assessment, okay, what's out there that's going to bite us, and how do we make sure it doesn't bite us? And more importantly, if it bites us, what are we going to do about it? How are we going to respond?

And it's a far, far cry from the plan-do-check-act, it's okay, we're going to plan to do a tailgate meeting. So we're going do...we're going to read something that the company's bought from some consultant in Timbuktu who's written all these beautiful little tailgate meetings a year ago in an office somewhere. I mean, it's just ludicrous.

And the workers are sitting there listening to the...maybe listening to this, mostly not, and they're signing off, but they've heard it because they just want to get to work. And the whole while, they're worried about, "Oh, boy, I hope this thing doesn't blow up on us." You know, they see the problems. They know the problems. We just tend not to ask them what's the problem. And the only time we really give them a right to participate is when we put out these pulse surveys and these cultural surveys as some people call them.

And there's nothing that's going to get you more to a moral fatigue workforce than throwing surveys at them that you have no intention of acting on. And surveys, I was at a conference once and the presenter said, well, backing up, the consultant who was presenting with somebody who sold safety culture surveys. So, right then, I went to the survey because I'm always curious with somebody who thinks there's a culture safety survey.

And he said in his presentation that the only true scientific measure in safety is a survey. And I asked him, like, "A survey is not a measurement, it's a form of gathering data. What measurement do you apply to that data?" He said, "Well, the survey." He just went round and round and round. I found out later he was in the business of selling surveys.

You know, so good on him. But I'll tell you, nothing is going to morally fatigue your workforce more than giving them survey asking them what they think, and then doing nothing about it. And eventually, they end up...yeah, they just tell you what you want to hear. What is it... I forget who said it, but the saying is that surveys only serve to prove your assumptions.

- So, I want to go back. You sort of hinted at some earlier research and earlier ideas. You wrote that the Industrial revolution mindset is why safety can't change the way it's regulated or educated. So I've got three questions in there. First of all, what do you mean specifically by the industrial revolution mindset?

- Well, so the industrial revolution, of course, is when safety really started coming to the forefront. Now, people will take it back to Hammurabi in Babylon and okay, that's our nice little story, but let's get realistic. You know, the industrial revolution is when we started...it was the machine era in safety where we started looking at the machines.

If we make the machines safe, then the worksite will be safe because we had all these moving parts all of a sudden that we never had before. So, if we make them safe, the job will be safe. And that's a fact, and that's still valid. We still need guarding on machine. We still need engineered controls on technology. Nothing wrong with that mindset. But then as we moved into the people era, where all of a sudden the performance plateaus came about that, okay, we can only do so much by guarding and engineering safety, guarding machinery.

We can only do so much of that. So, well, you know, if people were safe, we'd be safe. So, then we go back to to the turn of the century where people like Frederick Taylor came about, you know, and Taylorism was developed. And a lot of people argue, well, Taylor, he was misunderstood. Taylor did a lot of interesting things, and he did them in a time when those things probably most of them would work.

He did them at a time where people were very principled, at a time where rules could be taught. And in Taylor's view, the less rules, the better...not so much the less rules, but the less job function, the better. So people have little small jobs they can do, and part of it was to create efficiencies. But for the most part, his whole goal was to get rid of what he called soldiering, which is natural laziness as he puts it.

He was trying to eliminate that. So, to get around that mindset, if you implement that mindset of, okay, here's the rules. We have rules, basically. All you have to do is guard your machinery, hangover from that industrial revolution, and obey the rules. And if we do that, nobody gets hurt.

And when they do get hurt, it's because people didn't obey the rules. So yeah, that's sort of the mindset behind it, where that all came in and why it... And there's some truth to both those things.

- You also said...so the next part of my question is that's why safety can't change the way it's regulated or educated. So, I'm curious, how does this mindset affect safety regulation and then safety education?

- Yeah. So there's a lot of examples. I guess, first, we have to talk about regulation. And we need rules. Don't get me wrong. I'm anti-rule as a way of making things safe, but we do need rules. We need procedures.

We need directives. We need guidance. So, where that sort of falls apart in today's society is we still have all these rules. Excuse me. So, let's let's take, for example, a joint health and safety. So, a safety committee should not be the property of a safety professional. I've always said safety professionals should not be on those committees as a committee for the workers and the managers to sit down together and work together to identify real problems, fact finding.

And when you look at various jurisdictions around the world and the concepts...the concept of a joint committee, I think goes back to the '30s. They didn't call it that. It wasn't stated, but it fits, again, Heinrich's three principles of accident prevention. A committee

[inaudible] first, it creates an active interest in safety. And then so the committee's job then should be the fact find, because that's number two on Heinrich's three principles of action prevention, finding facts. And number three is developing plans based on those facts. And so in a nutshell, should be what a committee does. But if look at, say, in British Columbia, for example, if you look at the requirements of what a joint committee has to do by law, it's gotten so convoluted that they're basically managing safety.

They're now the safety clerks. They have to. You know, they have to count the TRIFs and the first aid cases and the this and the that, and they have to go on these inspections. You know, it's usually the monthly penguin block where they're all walking around and looking at stuff. They have to do accident investigations, although they're not really qualified, but they take a little bit of training.

And, you know, in DC that's nice, you take that to Ontario, and it's even more common because nobody likes rules better than the government of Ontario. That [inaudible]. Or you go to the states, and then in the states it's more like, the more rules we have, the less chance we can be liable when we get sued. It's all due diligence. So, these committees are caught up in this in these regulations that don't change.

So, the question is, why don't we change the regulations? Why do we continually try to change the workers? Why aren't we changing these regulators? And we do something, we change them a little bit, you know, but then we always implement them out of context. And in Canada, we had the [inaudible] bill that was meant to give up to prison terms to executives and big corporations who failed to properly secure safe work conditions.

That got watered down to where now it's the supervisors and managers that are going to jail. It's not the board of directors, CEOs, or the owners. So, that's a good change, but we implement it wrong. And we continue to implement these things so then now we go back to, "Okay, why are we teaching these things?"

Well, we're teaching them because if I'm going to be a young safety professional, I need to know the rules. So, I'm going to learn the rules. And I have a very good friend of mine in Ireland who says, "You guys in Canada to call them safety professionals. But, you know, it's all rules-based in a rules-based professional as a lawyer." And that's a long time in school [inaudible] passing bar exam. You guys got this rules-based system, and you let people write exam and call them a pro.

You know, he's like it bogs his mind. He's like, you know, lawyers are rules-based professionals, safety people aren't, but we have to be. And that's why we teach the way we teach. And that's why we certify the way we certify. Because if you don't know the rules, what good are you?

- So, what's your suggestion? And I realize, you know, you say very clearly, you don't have all the answers, you're starting the conversation. So, I'm not asking for perfection, but what direction do you think people should be looking in to change these things?

- Well, you know, I think we first need to stop and go back to Heinrich's three principles, create an active interest in safety, fact finding, and creating plans based on facts. And the facts that you find, not the facts that you copy cut and paste from somebody else.

And there are so many moving pieces to that. There are so many things we need to change, so many bad habits we need to change. I only talk about seven, but we really need to get a grip on how do we allow people to do what they know how to do. So, I think step one is to change the way we educate. I think if we're going to educate rules-based safety, we need to get it out of the safety diploma, safety degree, safety certificate, whatever.

We need to put those things into the trade schools and the professions. We need to have people who are studying to be carpenters have that. That needs to be a basic part of being a carpenter. Not unlike a pilot whose basic function is to do a pre-flight check. I have a really good friend of mine who's a retired Air Canada pilot. He lives down here in Mexico.

And he said to me one day, he said, "You know, my entire career at Air Canada, flying from Montreal to Germany and London," he said, "I never once did a safety check on [inaudible]." He said, "No," he said, "I did pre-flight checks. It's not siloed off in safety, it's part of how I work." He said, "It's part of how we work." We don't say, okay, well, now safety first, and then, okay, let's go around and fly this plane. His point was the plane didn't leave the ground until that pre-flight check was done.

Safety was embedded in it. And I say it in the book, I talk about it in the book, and you can imagine sitting on an aircraft and the pilot is saying, well, ladies and gentlemen, we're going to push back from the gate as soon as the safety officer does the pre-flight check." I think I'd be getting off that plane. Or, you know, til the safety professional does our flight plan for us, then we'll leave. Yeah, step one, I think, is we need to get safety out of the silo and put it back where it belongs.

You had a guest on the other day that said safety professionals shouldn't be in charge of safety. And I couldn't agree more. That's not our job. It's true. I believe our job is to support the people doing the work to make sure they have the tools that they need. And not tell them what tools they need. Let them tell us what tools they know, they know what tools they need.

Help them recognize as a second set of eyes maybe when they're crossing from one zone to another in zone management. If we're talking about from the safe zone into the hazard control zone into the audit control zone, you can see those things from the sideline. So, we need to make that change. We need to get safety into the trades, into the professions.

No professional engineers should be coming out of the university with a bachelor's degree in structural engineering that hasn't taken occupational safety training. And not just a class, in-depth into what it is. I think that's the big first step. And I think we also have to change the regulations a bit, to go, you know, quit making people chase these checkbox exercises.

We have all these great initiatives. The certificate of recognition when it first came out was a great initiative to reward people and recognize people who went above and beyond. It's now become the bare minimum, right? And it's a multi-billion dollar industry for people to sit there and check boxes and say, "Okay, that contractor's got a better record than that contractor."

They don't go out in the field and verify this stuff. But if I want to be a contractor, I got to spend thousands and thousands of dollars to get this seal of approval from somebody in an office somewhere, who knows?

- In a procurement department, I would think, right? And that sort of thing, or...

- Well, no, I'm thinking more like contracted checks and ISNetworlds. And there's a whole bunch of them. And, you know, I'm sure they have their place, but I'm sorry, if all you're looking for is, do I have a safety management system? Does it meet this standard? Do I have workers' compensation paid up to date? Do I have...who cares?

How good am I at my job? Am I good at my job? If I am, the rest comes... You know, there's ways that... I worked in oil and gas. And in oil and gas, out of the major oil and gas companies, any of the ones that I've worked with or consulted to had probably no more than 10% of people on staff. Everybody else was like me.

Everybody else was a consultant. And therefore, you know, they want to do due diligence, but what they don't want to do is just get out of their desk and go, look, it's easy for me to spend thousands and thousands of dollars. I've seen organizations that hire people strictly to manage their core. That's all they do.

They're busy checking boxes, and then they do their little internal audits. And before the external audit every three years, they run in and do another cleanup so that when the external auditor comes in, it looks fine. And there's all that stuff that happens in the middle that goes unnoticed.

- I wanted to ask that...one issue that you talk about a lot is context. So, safety management, you say, is implemented out of context from a work originally done by insurance actuaries among other people. So, can you tell me what is the difference in those two contexts, like in the historical insurance context and then in today's safety?

- Yeah. There's, again, a lot of moving pieces to that that need to be discussed. I mean, if we go back to Heinrich and his pyramid or his triangle, I've seen it used in a variety of ways. And very few of them ever hit the mark of what Heinrich actually said. A lot of people are anti-Heinrich, a lot of people are very pro-Heinrich. Well, aside from the three principles of accident prevention, which, I don't know, has become my mantra, you know, his three principles, create an active interest in safety and fact finding and doing plans by facts, somehow that one got thrown out.

We didn't bring that one with us, but we brought the triangle with us. So, in that case, basically what Heinrich said around his triangle is that if you have so many events of a similar type, so doing a similar job under the similar conditions, similar way, if you have that, then, you know, you will have this ratio of the accidents, you know, fatality, lost time, unsafe acts.

We've manipulated it so many different ways. Bird came in and manipulated it his way. We manipulated... But it was out of context. And we take it out of context. I was at a professional development conference and I heard a speaker say that they were...he was talking about a case study they did on one of their clients who had a fatality.

And the speaker said, "Then all of a sudden, my client had a fatality." And oh, he said, "But, you know, I shouldn't have been surprised because given hundreds of triangle, it's only a matter of time for any safety professional before they have to deal with a fatality." And I thought, "No, that's not what that means." That's not what it means.

The other side of that where it's taken out of context is I've seen people say, "Well, if we deal with all the little stuff at the bottom, none of the big stuff's going to happen." That's nonsense too. You know, and Deepwater Horizon proved that. You know, seven years no lost time, and they were hurrah, hurrah, no trips, slips, and falls and dropped objects. Let's focus on that. And they blew the rig up because in the background, there were people doing consultancies and pushing back against the plan that they had going forward in production.

So, Heinrich wasn't wrong. It's what we've done with what he gave us that's wrong. Likewise, I don't think the plan-do-check-act was necessarily wrong. It just is updated now and we've implemented it and people aren't products.

- A third thing that you say that may be controversial, folks, is that because a lot of my guests have strong opinions about behavior-based safety and you say, "There's been no concept in safety more misunderstood and implemented out of context."

So, I did want to ask you about that. How do you think people are misunderstanding it?

- That has become I think the biggest misused concept in all of safety. When I was first a safety person, I came out of the offshore medical side. I was an offshore paramedic before I got into safety. And I got into safety primarily because I got an offer and I couldn't refuse, but I didn't really know what to do.

I could walk around the rig and say, put your safety glasses on and put your hair down [inaudible], don't run with scissors. That's about all we had. And then all of a sudden, one day we got this beautiful package coming off the helicopter and it was DuPont STOP system. So now I had something I could work with. I had something I could do. I thought like, "Whoa, this is cool."

And what we did is, I think, we took the theories of behavioral-based safety and we lumped them all into behavioral observations. Behavioral-based safety has little to do with observations. Those two should never be mentioned in the same sentence. But when people hear behavioral-based safety, they lose their mind because they've been exposed to these failed observation schemes.

And the observation schemes are implemented with the plan-do-check-act, right? We're going to plan to do observations, and then we're going to check for compliance, or we're going to check for unsafe acts, or we're going to do the observations, we're going to check for this, and then we're going to act.

And you see the act in my experience was, okay, we are not getting enough observation cards, so we are going to put a quote in. Now, everybody will do one card once a day. And so you get up in the morning, offshore, you go downstairs, you go to the galley, you get your breakfast, you sit down, you fill out your daily card, you drop in the slot, and go to work.

And somebody somewhere is trying to make sense of these, "Oh, look how good we're doing. Everybody's doing really well." You know, I've worked for companies that said, "You know, we're getting too many unsafe acts and conditions. I want this to be a positive experience. So from now on, I want to see a majority of positive observations." So, hurray, I saw Murray wearing his hard hat, and I said, attaboy. You know, what nonsense?

What a waste of time? Now, behavioral-based safety, and, you know, maybe, I don't know, maybe Scott Geller will jump in and tell me I'm wrong, maybe not. I don't know. My belief on behavioral-based safety is, yeah, observing work is part of it, but it's not about observing individuals for slips, trips, and falls and housekeepings and PPE and all the stuff that we say is at the bottom of our control triangle...our hierarchy of controls, yet it's at the top of what we look for.

I believe that when you are observing work, what you're looking for is the behavior of the organization. What is driving the work to go this way? Why are these workers not real keen on doing this this way? It's not their behavior that you're meant to change, it's the organization's behavior, right?

So, this is one of the things I do when I work with joint committees is I get them to identify, we go back to the Heinrich, we get them to identify the serious stuff in those triangles. So, what are the precursors that you have for serious injury and fatality? Let's look at that. And okay, what controls do we have in place for those precursors?

Do we have them or we don't? If we don't have them, we need to think about putting some in or getting rid of that hazard impossible. If we do have them, okay, which ones aren't working? Which ones are constantly being violated or bypassed? It's not violation, it's an erosion.

We have to look through, okay, what's eroding? Why are so many people not doing that? Now, some people say, "Oh, that's a violation of lifesaving rules and then we'll fire them." Bullshit, lifesaving rules only teach me, don't get caught. I'm still going to do what I need to do to get the job done. So, when we look at, okay, why are these erosions there? We can correct something.

And now what we're correcting is leadership. The organization's behavior that's changing, we're not changing the workers' behavior. The workers' behavior is simply telling us this isn't working, and they're the only ones who know.

- Yeah, it occurs to me, or what this makes me think of is incentivizing, right? So, an organization can say, "We want you to be safe, but what we're going to incentivize is the speed of your work, not the safety." And so the organization is sort of setting the parameters of the trade-offs, choices, erosions, like all those things that the workers end up doing.

- Yes. And incentivizing those successes of, okay, no injuries, go zero. Incentivize that. You don't get hurt, you get a bonus. And so, I can go into any organization, any operation right now, and I could get them to zero, like that.

Just snap the fingers, I will get them to zero. They won't stay there and they won't know they're not there until somebody's killed or seriously injured, right? It's what Aubrey Daniels calls safe by accident. That's not the hard part. And when you incentivize those things, you're not changing the behavior of the job, you're changing the behavior of the response.

You know, when I worked offshore as a medic, and I'm not proud of this at all, but when I worked offshore as a medic, the rig managers loved me because I could have somebody stitched up and have their stitches out before they had to get on the helicopter for crew change, you know, 10 days later. And there was no report. And it's a medical treatment case, but there's no report.

Why? Because if I put in that report, everybody on that rig is going to lose their bonus. So, better we just keep it here, we keep it localized. I've worked for offshore installation managers that were adamant, you do not say anything to anybody about what's going on out here. And who is it...Clive Lloyd, who says it best, "You can't fix a secret." And I love that.

Clive says his mantra, right? And he's so, so spot on, you can't fix a secret. So, incentivizing those things, that's a big part of what we're doing. And with BBS, it was, you know, we want to see so many positive cards. We want to see this many cards. You know, and I've sat down and looked at people's observation systems and said, "Okay, all of these are nonsense. They mean nothing."

Right? But the ones that are actually probably count weren't observations at all, they were interventions. And they're the serious ones. You know, when they look at, oh, we're doing better than worse, we've got more positive than negative. No, you don't. No, it's just easier to report the positive.

- Yeah, of course, especially if you're doing it before breakfast.

- Yeah. So, BBS, you can get, you know, so many people... I'm a true believer that you can use...I mean, there's behaviors, behaviors are behaviors. You can use operational behaviors, what people are doing, not specifically on a checklist. You can watch how things are going and get a really good idea of what the organization's climate is like or the organizational culture.

I'll use culture with an organization, I'll never say it was safety, not without spitting. But the organizational culture or the operational climate, you can see through group behaviors, not individual behaviors. And that only points you to the problem, which is the organization's behavior. And that can be changed rather easy if you have leadership that's willing to change their behavior.

And that's hard, there's competing values involved.

- I want to come back to something that you referred to because you say quite strongly you believe that safety culture is a scapegoat.

- I think safety culture has become a scapegoat. When all these bad habits we're using don't work, when all else fails, we can blame it on the culture. Well, they just have a bad safety culture. Well, they don't have a culture of safety. Well, I don't know if you've been following...oh, geez, I can't remember his name.

I had it in the top of my head a second ago. But one of your guests, most recent guests said that he will debate anybody that there's no safety culture. He will take [inaudible].

- Tony Muschara? Was it Tony Muschara?

- No. Hey, you know what? I'll find it.

- Cut this part out, please, editors, with the part where we're looking for the name.

- Yeah. I have it out here. Here we go. No. All right.

- There's a lag between [crosstalk 00:41:13].

- It was James Junkin.

- James MacPherson. Oh, Junkin. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

- Yeah, James Junkin. I believe it was James Junkin. And he said he would debate anybody, anywhere, anytime, on your program, anywhere else that safety is not a culture and there's no such thing. And if he does, I want to be on his team because I'll go there with him. And safety's not a culture. Safety's not a thing. This is part of the problem we have with safety is we do safety.

You hear this all the time, "Well, you better get safety in here." My name's not safety. I don't know anybody whose name is safety. But you got to get safety in here. Oh, better get a tailgate meeting, call safety meeting. You know, we're going to do some safety, or we're going to have our safety moment, then we're going to do work. And there's organizational cultures...you know, if you want to talk about culture, when I did the research for my dissertation for my master's degree, I used Geert Hofstede cultural survey to...

Part of what I looked at was I looked at national cultures and at-risk behaviors and personality types, and is there any alignment between any of those things? Or do some cultures have certain personality types more than others? And do some cultures have more risky behaviors? Or do personality types of certain type have more risky behavior? And the answer was no.

But when I contacted Geert Hofstede and asked him, "Can I use your cultural model?" And it was all offshore rigs, and he was very kind and he guided me saying, "Okay, but make sure that...you know, you have to test this model using the same demographic." So, even within culture. You couldn't do a cultural survey of Canada, and say, "Okay, I'm going to take a questionnaire from the upper east side of Vancouver and farm community in Saskatchewan."

Somebody who's 60 years old in that farm community and somebody who's 20 years old, you wouldn't get a result. They're different. They're not the same people. So you have to have your demographic. So, he helped me along that way. But he did also mention in passing that he felt I was a very ambitious amateur, and that he could save me a lot of time in letting me know that you're not going to find a culture within a statement.

You're not going to find it. But I was adamant I was because I was going to be the next savior of the cultural survey world. And much to my surprise, he was right because there wasn't. What there was was various bits and pieces that come together. You know, we had this big debate on James's podcast, you can go check it out. There's a huge debate.

But one of the people involved in that debate is somebody who I've quoted over the years, somebody who I admire a lot, who's adamant that there is a safety culture and any evidence that's showing that there isn't is because people don't know how to do research. Now, that made me stop and think, you know, if you want to look up bias in research, that might be one of them because somebody's findings don't agree with yours you think they're a little bit biased, maybe that culture's there.

But they went on to tell me, "No, no, no, it's Responsible Care. It all started with Responsible Care." And Bhopal, India and the DuPont...not DuPont, Union Carbide explosion. Bhopal and the Union Carbide explosion, and that's where it started and it was Responsible Care. And it was meant to be an entire management system that incorporated transportation, manufacturing, process health and safety, disposing of hazardous waste, emergency response, all these things.

Well, I don't feel that. But why is that? Because his closing argument was, you know, and that was the first formal attempt to create a culture of safety across an entire industry. Wait a second, you talk about transportation, manufacturing, disposable with hazardous goods waste, how does safety get top billing? How does that become a safety culture? That's an organizational culture, and safety is just a little subjective piece of it, right?

I honestly believe that the biggest and the only cultural influence on safety, and it's not a good one, is the subculture of the safety profession. We are so busy looking for these magic bullets, and we're so busy sticking to the stuff we're selling to these big corporations that we refuse to realize damage we're doing. I like to call it safety colonization.

I mean, if we talk about values and rituals and religions, things that make up culture, national culture, we talk about all the symbols, the values, who am I to go into somebody's organization and say, "Okay, everything you believe is wrong. Everything you're doing is wrong. You're going to now do it my way."

And we've seen this, we've seen this with real colonization around the world. We've seen it in India, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Ireland, way back when. We've seen this colonization. This is what we're doing with safety. We're safety colonizing, and we're going in and we're turning people off. And some people, they might jump on board when they first hear it, "Hey, I like this idea." Maybe something will get done around here.

But then we get in that safety management cycle where all of a sudden competing values jump in. There's a lack of response. We can't demonstrate the values that we're saying, and we start to erode trust. And we start to fatigue people ethically. And we lead to disengagement, moral disengagement is where this road heads. And we won't let it go.

We're like a dog with a bone, and we've got to call it a culture because if things don't work, it's not me, it's safety professionals, it's them. They have a bad culture. And I just wish we could lose that. I wish we could look at it for what it is. It's a subjective piece. How we handle safety, how we manage safety, and how we interact that piece with production, time, money, hazardous waste, whatever you have, however we do that responsible care, I like that term, is just one of the subjective pieces of a culture.

And, you know, there is subcultures and we've got professional subcultures, you know, the old saying, "You can always tell an engineer, it's just not much that." That is a stereotype of the engineering culture. Sorry for my engineering friends, I think it's funny to this day. It's right up there with, you know, don't mind him speaking, he think he's kind of cutting off the circulation to his brain.

But the reality is safety profession has a subculture...is a subculture. And it's that culture that's impacting safety negatively, safety performance, I believe. We have to change it. And it goes back to all these seven habits. We have to change how we're educating safety practitioners and safety professionals. We have to change how we're regulating safety.

We have to change how we're managing safety. We have to go back. The only time I want to go back to the 1930s is to Heinrich's three basic principles, to develop an active interest in safety, find facts, and base your progress on those facts. Not flavor of the day.

Not slip, trips, and falls. Not, "Oh, well, you know, now we're going to have a safe culture today." We're going to have...oh, look, we're going to call it this. Well, we're going to call it that. Let's call it this. There's a lot of really good work going on there. I think we need to get rid of the labels.

You know, I think safety differently is a good concept. I think HOP is a good concept. I think all of those things are good concepts. As a profession, we have to be very mindful that we're not implementing them out of context, taking them as a magic bullet. But there's pieces of all those things that we can use to encourage people to participate on facts and to fix those facts before somebody gets hurt.

And I think to me, it's rather simple. There's that competing value of money. And all of these things I just mentioned are multimillion-dollar industries. So, anybody who's involved in that doesn't want to kill the golden goose.

- So, we're just about to time and I'm going to move into some questions that I do ask all my guests. I think that you've heard these, so you shouldn't be too surprised. But if you were to focus soft skill or human relationship training for tomorrow's safety professionals, so throw out regulations, technical skills, that sort of thing, what do you think would best prepare future safety professionals for the kind of challenges they'll see in the workplace?

- I think first and foremost, we have to teach young safety... Oh, hang on. I need a drink of water. I think we have to start by training the up-and-coming safety practitioners to understand that they're not going to know everything.

They don't have to know everything. They're not supposed to know everything. If they think they know everything, they better step back and take their pause. And you see them coming out of school, I was the same way I'm sure. As a paramedic I was, I came out of school, I thought I could do open heart surgery in somebody's backyard. But, you know, I see that a lot in young safety professionals, especially if they graduate and then write a certification exam, like a professional designation and they get that.

Well, thou get out of my way. I love watching them...when I mentor them, I love watching them going into those exams, scared and I don't know enough. And they feel imposter syndrome almost. I shouldn't be writing this exam. And then as soon as they find out they passed, they see me, and go, "You don't have my designation. You get out of the way."

So, we need to teach them that that's not necessary. They don't need to know everything. They don't need to be afraid. I think humility is, I think, the biggest thing as safety professionals that we have to learn is how to say I was wrong. I think we have to learn to say, I'm sorry. I think we have to teach all of safety profession to say to workers, "Teach me, help me understand. Show me what you do."

You know, I often in presentations use the picture of the person with a high-vis vest and a clipboard and the caption reads, "I don't know how to do your job. But my book says you're doing it wrong." Right? We need to address that because it's funny, but it's not. It's true. So, I think that the soft skills we have to teach are trust, compassion, and understanding. We have to seek first to understand and not worry about being understood.

- So, in the spirit of humility and saying I was wrong, if you could go back in time to the beginning of the safety portion of your career, what's one piece of advice you might give to yourself?

- Probably just that, you don't have to know everything, so don't pretend that you do. And don't fall back on the rule book to prop up your point of view. Yeah. I mean, I remember being so, so out of place when I moved out of the healthcare offshore medical side into this occupational health and safety side.

And then I actually became a safety practitioner by accident because I was a medic on a rig, and then I was made country manager for a company that provided medics in the Middle East. And the rig that I had been on, the installation manager of that rig also got promoted about the same time I did to country management.

And one day he came into my office and said, "Well, the client wants us to have a safety guy now. Do you want the job?" And I said, "What does the safety guy do?" He said, "I don't know." So, I go, "Perfect." That's my kind of job. You know, but I went out there thinking I had to know everything. And I had to know in my mind was the rules.

So, I started reading up on rules and it was an American rig, so I was volumes deep in OSHA regulations and this and that. But I didn't need to know any of that. What I needed to do was get out of the rig floor and say, "Guys, teach me what you do. Show me how to do this." And eventually, I got there but yeah, it was a lot of hard work.

- How can our listeners learn more about the topics in our discussion today? Obviously, we'll be mentioning the book, but are there other resources that you find really helpful?

- You know, I think one of my favorite quotes is Margaret Wheatley's, and she says that her big change starts with small conversations by people who care. So, I think anybody who's interested in any of this stuff, read. Read what you can get. Listen to shows like this. Listen to people talk.

None of us are experts. None of us. Not a single one of us are expert, but some of us have some experience and some of us have got some really good, you know, scientific evidence. And then there's people like me who have a lot of anecdotal evidence, and I often get a lot of criticism but that's just anecdotal evidence. A lot of academics will say that to me, "Well, yes, it is anecdotal evidence, which means I'm taking your scientific evidence and watching it in practice for a couple of years."

That's where the power of anecdotal evidence comes in. But I think reading and discussing, have the conversations, and have them with an open mind. You know, don't be my buddy over there on LinkedIn who every time he gets up against the rope says, well, you don't know how to do research or they don't know how to do research. Maybe they do, they just found something different.

Have an open mind. See what works for you. You know, there's a lot of great resources. There's a lot of good writers out there right now. I mean, I have to be honest, I've never read the safety differently stuff, a whole bunch of it. I've heard it at conferences. I like what I hear.

I've never really dove into the books, the Dekker books and it's on my list of want to do it. It's a good place to start, you know? Clive Lloyd is one of my favorite right now. I mean, anything he's talking about or writing, I'm on, I want to hear it. Great resource. But more than that, whatever you take, whatever you read or write or hear, don't poopoo it right away.

Don't write things off that haven't worked in the past. Start conversations, start conversations with other safety professionals, other safety practitioners. Start conversations with workers, with managers, with executives. Start having conversations. To me, that's the best exploration. I have learned, you know, the older I get, the easier it is for me to change my mind.

A lot of people say it's the opposite, the older you get, the more stubborn you get. But the older I get, the more willing I am to say, "You know what? I was wrong." Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I do need to look at this. Maybe I need to think about this. But I have no paycheck attached to it, so it's easy.

- So, speaking of conversations, where can our listeners find you on the web should they want to reach out and start a conversation?

- Yeah, I can be reached through my website, which is trilenssafety.com. That's trilenssafety.com. There's a bio there on the website. That is I've expanded my bio. I take it back now to, I think, eight years of age. I got tired of doing the executive bio.

You know, I got a degree here and did that there. I thought, "No, who am I? Who really am I?" So it's there. You know, on the website I say my life has been an open book, mostly open to the wrong page. But yeah, the website or they can reach out and email me at murray@trilenssafety.com or on LinkedIn. I'm also on LinkedIn.

I don't do a lot of social media, but LinkedIn is where I'm at.

- And we'll have most of those...or we'll have those linked in the description in the show notes rather. So, we've covered a lot today. Thanks so much for joining us, Murray.

- Yeah, thanks for having me.

- Yeah. And again, listeners, the book is entitled, "Seven Bad Habits of Safety Management: Examining Systemic Failures," and it's available for pre-order in August and for sale in September. And for future listeners, this is September 2023 I'm speaking about. Publishing information, where can people find the book if they're interested?

- Yeah. They can go onto the Taylor & Francis website or CRC Press website, and search my name, it'll come up. Or just go to my website and I have a link there to Taylor & Francis and there's order forms there.

- Great. Sounds good. Well, thanks for tuning in. This podcast is made possible by a small but dedicated team at Slice, working behind the scenes to find interesting guests for interesting conversations. If you'd like to be a guest on the show, head over to safetylabs.sliceproducts.com/contact to get in touch.

Thanks again, Murray.